As we know, last November was a bloodbath for California Republicans. So bad that some Republicans even said their “brand” was “dead.” One reason: 300,000 more Latinos cast ballots in 2010 than 2008, but less than one-third of Latinos voted for the GOP’s guv candidate Meg Whitman or its Senate nominee Carly Fiorina.

“It was a sign that the so-called sleeping giant of Latino voters had woken up,” said Marty Wilson, Fiorina’s campaign manager. Wilson, among others, wanted to deeper explore this disconnect, so he commissioned a survey of 400 California Latino voters that he released today and the results aren’t pretty. A lot of tough love in there.

But Wilson believes not all hope is lost. The poll finds that there’s a way to talk about immigration is by bonding over securing the border first

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This is a long-term project, Wilson said. His goal, he said, “is to make us competitive by 2014.”

Too often Democrats can shut down any GOP-Latino conversation merely by pointing out that the GOP led Prop 187, said Hector Barajas — who did Latino outreach for Whitman’s campaign and is a statewide strategist. He is currently working with Univision on another project to demonstrate the growing power of Latino voters and is presenting it nationally to GOP leaders.

“We have to get beyond that point,” Barajas said. And you can’t do that with a 30-second ad during a campaign, he said.

A major challenge is that “Republicans are very corporately focused: They want results right away,” Barajas said. Instead, they need to invest in building long-term relationships with the Latino community.

It can’t purchased with 30-second ads, Barajas said. Despite the millions Whitman spent in outreach, when problems with her former Latino nanny went public, Barajas said she had no reservoir of support in the community.

Right now, there are only two Spanish-speaking spokesman for Republicans in the legislature, Barajas said. “And one of them is my sister,” he said.

Louis Desipio, a professor of political science at UC Irvine and expert on the Latino electorate, said “the finding about conservatism will probably be encouraging for some Republican leaders (and it jibes with other surveys), but my take is that Latinos interpret conservatism differently than (today’s) Republicans.

“My sense is that Latinos interpret conservatism as protecting what they have achieved rather than a small government/socially conservative agenda,” Desipio said. “Another way of saying this is that they are big government conservatives, which is an oxymoron among white conservatives.”

In education, Desipio said, “Latinos will respond to a Republican who advocates access to a first rate education for all students, but this means building more schools and hiring more (culturally sensitive) teachers, not adding more tests and creating more charter schools. In other words, few Republicans today speak about education in the way that Latinos interpret quality and access.”